


The Lone and Level Sands

by Moonlark



Category: Women's Hockey RPF, Women's Soccer RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Crossover, Dehydration-Induced Hallucinations, Desert, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-10-06 04:38:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10325768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moonlark/pseuds/Moonlark
Summary: "Emily wakes up. She gets dressed. She makes instant coffee, and grimaces as she drinks it. She hauls her daily bucket of water from the pump outside. She cleans up some litter the wind has carried in. She swears pleasantly at the crows on the building's roof. She does not think about the silence."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the last line of the poem Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. This story is fairly Em-centric, and Amanda won't appear until the third chapter, but she plays a very big role in it. Comments are very much desired, and con crit is welcomed, as long as it's constructive. If there's anything I should tag that I didn't, please let me know.

Emily wakes up. She gets dressed. She makes instant coffee, and grimaces as she drinks it. She hauls her daily bucket of water from the pump outside. She cleans up some litter the wind has carried in. She swears pleasantly at the crows on the building's roof. She does not think about the silence.

She heads back inside and grabs a can of something nonperishable, heats it up and eats without tasting. The fresh produce section spoiled some time ago, but she still hasn't gotten it all cleaned out. She brings a wheelbarrow over and loads it up with rotting apples. The crows flock around her as she dumps the fruit in the lot behind the store. If there was water, maybe she could use them as fertilizer or something like that. If there was water.

The pump is starting to rust, and every day it's a little harder to move the handle. Maybe she should be scared of that. She doesn't really feel much about it though. She doesn't really have any connections anymore. The pump and the little water it brings is the only thing holding her to this ten-house town. When the water goes, she'll vanish into the desert and find another place to blow in--or maybe she'll drift off into the lone and level sands. Maybe she'll disappear like footsteps before the bone-dry breeze. Maybe she'll just crumble into the dunes and debris and empty, open silence.

She shakes her head and takes a jug of oil from the store, heading out to the pump and carefully wrangling the old metal into working order. There's no way to tell how much water is left for the pump to bring up, but she hasn't encountered any sputtering yet, so she should have at least a couple days. Maybe she has more time. Maybe she has less and before she knows it she's going to shrivel up and float off like the plastic bags she keeps finding in the yard.

Her shirt is off and there are flecks of rust mixing with sweat all over her arms and back by the time the pump's moving smoothly again. She considers trying to clean herself off, but there's still plenty of work to be done. The shutters on the store's windows are loose, and the rattling is driving her crazy. One of the houses that cluster a short distance from the store has collapsed, and there's good material to be salvaged. The stack of firewood next to the store's heater is dwindling, and though the days are filled with sun, the nights are cold enough that she shivers and shifts without sleep. And, as always, there is the stinging sand, ever-present and endless, heaping in corners with withered dreams and demons and other things that the wind blows in.

She is not yet one of those things, but every day, the wind tugs harder, weightless, winged, waiting.

***

It is morning again. She wakes up. She pulls her hair back into a messy ponytail. She drags on an old pair of shorts and a ragged t-shirt. She stumbles downstairs, still half asleep. She shades her eyes against the summer sun and blinks as a rough wind rises. She does not think about the silence.

She draws another creaky bucket of water from the pump, then heads back inside to the gutted-out kitchen in the back room of the store. The tank for the gas stove is low--not empty yet, but low enough that the stove coughs like a sick child as she tries to coax it to life. There's more gas in the closet, though. It won't run out until long after the water is gone.

She boils the water for coffee and ramen, chewing a nut bar as she waits. Her diet's about as out of balance as it gets, too many carbs and salts and not enough protein and fiber, but it's keeping her alive, along with the vitamins she pulled from the store's skeleton shelves. She drinks the coffee and swallows a handful of vitamins, then eats half a cup of ramen--she can't stomach any more.

The smell of gas lingers in the kitchen long after she's shut the stove off. It smells bitter, acrid, like some kind of dying dream. Like the mummified ghosts that crumbled to dust without water. Like the desert, like failure, like giving up.

There's a broom resting against the wall just inside the shop's door. She grabs that and heads outside, clearing away the sand that had gathered around the pump and the firewood, dancing in on last night's storm and nesting in the silence. It's hard work; not because her muscles are angry at her, but because the silence is making her twist and tense and turn to look over her shoulder as her skin crawls. She tries to laugh a little, to talk while she sweeps, but it's a hollow sound--a small sound wilting in this desert dressed up as a ten-house town. The silence smiles, and curls up, and waits, and when her voice trails off, scratched and cracking in the brittle air, it oozes back into her footsteps and rubs up against her legs, cracks open her mouth and drips down her throat.

It tastes like defeat--or rather, like giving up.

The air rustles above her and a shadow swoops down to perch on the pump, watching her with bright, beady eyes. The crow caws, throaty and harsh, and the silence snaps in half. Several other birds land nearby, cocking their heads and uttering inquisitive croaks, and Emily finally finds it in her to grin back. There's a part of her that almost cringes, waiting for the silence to crawl back in, to drag her away, but it doesn't even echo around, just sighs and slinks off into the dunes.

When she goes back inside, she makes sure to leave some more decomposing produce out as thanks to the black birds.

***

It isn't morning yet, but Emily can't sleep. She sits on a block of cement at the edge of the yard, where dirt and desert meet. She's got a wooden pole in one hand, the old handle of a broken rake, that she's using to trace words and patterns in the sand--god, she misses writing. It's quiet out, but predawn stillness is different from the silence that stifles and chokes during the day. Predawn silence is gentle, tranquil, like the world is resting--nothing like the oppressive scorching silence that beats down with the sun, burning in a mockery of dreadful anticipation.

A breeze coasts through the yard, and Emily shivers. She should go back inside. The darkness out beyond the run-down houses is starting to turn gray, and she can hear the crows stirring in their nests. An early riser flaps down to perch on the pump again. The pump is a popular place for them to perch. Another bird settles on the ground by the woodpile, tugging on something between two logs with a quick jerk of its head.

Emily squints.

It's a piece of paper, crumpled and sand-specked. The wind must have blown it in overnight.

The crow loses interest and hops away toward the remains of the rotting apples, and Emily stands and crosses the yard. She kneels, picks up the page and shakes off the sand. Black ink wanders across the pale page, Times New Roman hiking trails in a wild white wasteland, but it's still too dark to make out the words. She folds it up and tucks it into a pocket. She'll save it for later--for the heat of the day when the sun is scorching the sands and there's nothing to do but wait--which Emily has never been very good at.

She doesn't even know what the paper says, but it doesn't really matter. It could be a tax form, and she'd still read it. Whatever it is, it has to be better than the dull creeping monotony of the midday sun and whistling wind and swirling sand and the ever-present lurking silence.

***

It is noon. Or maybe it isn't. It might be later. It could be earlier, but probably not. It might be noon, or it might be almost sunset by now. Emily can't tell, not with the way she's got the shutters locked tight against the wind. Most likely it's somewhere in between.

Her body doesn't have much to say about time. It's not hungry, but that doesn't mean anything anymore. Her biological clock's all screwed up. She hasn't been sleeping well, or even eating much lately, trying to make the cup noodles and nut bars last. There's not a lot of them left, but at least when they're all gone she'll have a couple weeks' leeway before her body gives out. Not like with the water.

She stands and begins to pace the room, flinching every time a gust slams into the shutters. Most of the windows still have glass, but if the western shutters break, she'll be feeling the full force of those howling winds. Already drifts of sand have piled themselves in the corners and below the shuttered windows, and the floor is rough and gritty beneath her feet. From somewhere outside comes the screech of metal on metal, and Emily winces and covers her ears.

She's nervous. She's incredibly on edge, she knows this. There's something about being trapped inside during a sandstorm that gets to her in a way that nothing else really has so far. She's gotten very good at blocking certain things out, pushing them to the back of her mind, but the whistling wind-driven sand makes that impossible. She can't stay still, but she can't go anywhere either. And in the dark of the shuttered, shaking store, it's much harder to not think about all the things she can't afford to think about.

She flops down on the bed and closes her eyes as the mattress sags. God, she's bad at this. She wasn't made to sit around inside. She jumps around too much, switching from idea to idea, restless unless she gives her hands or legs or brain something to do. She fidgets. Shifts. Taps. Anything but staying still with nothing to do.

She sighs and rolls over, then halts at the crinkling sound that follows. The paper, she remembers, and reaches into her pocket and pulls it out. She unfolds it and scoots over to the one shaft of light coming through the crack between the northern shutters.

The page is torn in places, faded and stained by sun and mud. Most of it is illegible, but there's still one paragraph in the middle of the page where she can still make out the words.

 

> " _So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down._ "

Emily stares at the paper for a moment. Reads it over again. Sits. Stares at the boards of the far wall. Looks down at the page and reads it again.

" _I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon..._ "

She stands. She walks over to the western windows. She places a hand on a shutter and feels it shiver beneath her fingertips.

She makes a decision.

***

It is morning. The pump is creaking again. Emily has drawn a good four buckets out of it already today, and transfered those to plastic water bottles in a backpack, trying it on after each bottle. Water is heavy, but she's gonna need to carry as much as she can. The pack is about two thirds of the way full, and she staggers when putting it on. She can fit more in there, though. She has to fit as much as she can.

She's leaving. She's walking away from this empty shell of a ten-house town. She's heading off across the desert to see where her feet take her, before the wind blows in and chooses for her. She's getting out while she still can, while the pump still draws enough water to fill her bottles, while her legs and arms and eyes still move, while her determination lasts.

The pump starts to sputter after the next bucket, and what comes up is dark and grimy and full of mud. It doesn't matter, though, because her pack is filled with all the water weight she can carry, and tonight she'll eat one last dinner in the store's gutted kitchen, and then she'll snatch a few hours of sleep, and then she'll wake and say her goodbyes and start walking westward in the blue-silver of the cold moon. She'll walk to the horizon, away from the rising sun, and without a single glance behind.

She's leaving, and when she goes, she won't be coming back.

***

It is afternoon, and Emily has been walking since well before dawn.

There's a shape in the sand up ahead, a rusted-over horse trailer half-covered by the sand. It provides a thin sliver of shade on its eastern edge, ever-growing as the afternoon rolls on. She takes the respite gladly, slipping her pack off and leaning back against the warm aluminum. She allows herself an hour's rest and three sips of water, along with a handful of salted nuts. Then she packs everything up and steps out of the trailer's shadow.

She takes a moment to stare over the sands, doubting. The mounds and dunes roll on, receding into a dream-like distance, hills and valleys resolving into a vast plain that seems too flat to exist in this world. The sky above seems to mimic that plain, curving around in a great expanse, a rounded lid of its own. There is not a cloud in sight. There has never been a cloud in sight. The sun tracks steadily westward. The wind sighs distractedly and then lies down to rest. Around her, the silence hangs, and echoes, and waits.

For all she knows, there are no other people in the world.

Emily smiles. "Here's to finding some."

She shoulders her pack and begins to walk, scuffing her feet in the sand, eyes fixed on the vanishing points of the horizon, an infinity away. She walks for a long time, throwing heartbeats at the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The paper Em reads is a quote from the journals of Sylvia Plath.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while, but I'm back!

It is nearing midnight, almost five days after Emily left the empty town in the middle of the emptier sands. The dunes faded on the third day, melting into a jumble of scree-studded hills and rocky cliffs and rough hard earth, interspersed with hardy desert shrubs and cacti. Small pebbles shift and roll underfoot, sliding against each other as she zigzags her way down a hillside, and each step brings with it a small cloud of dust.

The moon provides enough light for Emily to walk (or rather, hike) by, even on the uneven rocky ground. She's become practically nocturnal now, moving from dusk till dawn, then curling up under her thin emergency blanket, shiny side up to reflect the pounding sunlight and try to keep herself from being cooked. In daylight, the heat is almost unbearable, and sunburn constantly threatens. So Emily sleeps the day away, and drinks when she needs to, and then packs up and moves on under cover of darkness.

She kind of likes hiking at night. There's a certain meditative quality to it. Stars shine brightly overhead with no human light to block them out. The moon drifts serenely overhead, and the repetition of her footsteps on the moonlit land forms a rhythm of peaceful emptiness to time her breaths to. One, two, three, four. Left, right, left, right. Step by step. On and on. And slowly, as she walks, the nighttime desert comes alive.

Little desert squirrels scurry from crevasse to crevasse, stopping to nibble on a plant or stuff their faces full of seeds. Jackrabbits hop leisurely among the sparse, coarse grasses, then bound away when she gets too near. The yip of a coyote echoes from rock to rock, somewhere in front of her, and another coyote answers. The lizards and snakes are busy sleeping, well away from the cold of a desert night, but the occasional green hummingbird that darts across her path more than makes up for it. Once in a while, a bighorn sheep bleats in the distance, and sometimes, at dawn or dusk, she catches a glimpse of a vulture circling high in the sky, riding the warm air currents with ease. Grasshoppers blend in with the stony soil until they move, and as always, each sunrise is met with the rough rasping caws of the crows. There is more life out here than she'd ever imagined, between succulents clinging to the rock outcroppings and escarpments and the creatures that take shelter among them.

And yet.

Even this far out in the desert, the silence still haunts her. It follows in her footsteps, mile after mile, slinking along behind her and waiting for a chance to crawl in and claim her as its own. Watching. Lingering. Echoing in each uncertainty, in every restless moment.

It haunts her.

Even at night.

***

It is just after dusk on the sixth day when Emily notices the clouds gathering in the sky in front of her. She's packing up the emergency blanket, crouching beside the stunted Joshua tree that had given her a small sliver of shade in the burning heat of the afternoon. Most of the water bottles in her pack are empty by now, but they're lightweight, so she keeps them around in the hope that she'll be able to find somewhere to refill them. She's hungry, really hungry, the handful of nuts she's munching on barely taking the edge off, but the hunger is welcome compared to the listless, restless emptiness she'd been trapped in, back at the old store six days behind her. She swallows, takes a drink, and zips up her pack.

When she looks up, the clouds on the horizon look lower, darker, hanging on the edge of the sky and rolling inexorably forward like an avalanche in slow motion. In the five minutes she's spent packing up, they've already moved visibly closer, heavy, towering, grey, harbingers of the storm-- and Emily reminds herself that a storm out here could be nothing more than lightning, dry crackles and flashes that set the bone-dry juniper bushes alight-- but she still can't keep herself from hoping.

She hears the rain before she feels it, the rumbling drum of droplets upon dry earth standing the hairs of her arms on end. There's almost no light left in the sky, but she can still make out the darkened line where the torrent begins to fall. Quickly, she takes all the empty water bottles out of her pack and opens them, lining them up on the ground with their mouths gaping at the sky. The pack is covered with the emergency blanket and wedged in the fork of the Joshua tree in the hopes of keeping it relatively dry, and then she steps back and waits for the rain to come.

The storm rolls in like an avalanche, slamming into the earth around her with a sharp dusty beat. The drops sting as they slam into her skin, cold and careless in their embrace, soaking through her shirt in seconds. She loves it: the feeling of cold water rolling across her shoulders, down her back, through her hair, wetting her to the bone. She's missed this, she really has. She tilts her head back, squeezing her eyes shut, and opens her mouth to shout in relief, almost in prayer -- one more open mouth in the line of bottles gaping at the sky.

The rain lasts an immeasurably long yet inconsolably short amount of time, and then it's gone, just as quickly as it came. Emily can't help but laugh as she gathers the bottles and screws their lids on, joy and exhilaration coursing through her veins. None of the bottles are more than half full, some much less, having tipped over under the onslaught of water, but it's enough to give her a few more days. The pack (along with her little food and spare clothes) is still mostly dry and it doesn't take long to put everything back in it. Then she shoulders it, turns west again, and starts walking.

***

On the ninth day, some time before dawn, Emily comes to a road. She doesn't see the sun-bleached asphalt until her feet notice the change from the crumbling, dusty flats to the raised hardness of blacktop. Then she looks down and finds herself toe to toe with a dotted yellow line that runs off on either side of her, north to south. To her left, the road recedes to a razor-thin vanishing point, a hundred miles distant. To her right, it crests a small rise and disappears from view.

She turns north, toward the rise, and keeps walking.

***

Emily sees the car just after sunrise.

She's been pacing along the road for a couple hours now, steady footfalls on the gradually lightening pavement, following the faded paint of the dotted yellow line. Her shadow walks next to her, long and dark and aging with the dawn, pointing left in a constant affirmation that west is there, and always will be. The road twists and turns gently, winding its way above sagebrush and thistles but mostly heading north. It is still cool out, morning hanging comfortably in the air, but she knows the heat will come soon enough. So she walks north, and as she walks, she scans the roadsides for any scrap of shade that she could make her camp in.

At first, she thinks the car is just another boulder, albeit one possibly big enough to camp in the shade of. As she gets closer, it resolves into a pale blue sedan, well-rusted and squatting defunct by the side of the road. A crow is perched on top of it, pecking at the roof with a bored, listless air. When it sees her, it squawks and flutters away, flapping a few yards down the road and then stopping to watch her with beady eyes.

Emily ignores it and heads toward the car. Maybe there's water, she thinks, ignoring the part of her brain that wonders why the car was left all the way out here. She doesn't want to consider how it got here. She doesn't have to. She just has to look and see if there's something to drink--

A half-mummified corpse grins at her through the driver's window.

She turns away and fights back the urge to vomit. God, she should have been expecting that. There was no way the car got out here without a driver.

The crow hops closer.

Emily glares at it. "You could've warned me," she says. Her voice sounds rusty and harsh in the dry desert air.

The crow simply looks back at her, as if to say _I'm here, aren't I? Isn't that warning enough?_

Emily laughs. "You're a little feathery asshole," and the crow squawks, indignation or impatience or probably just Emily personifying things. She laughs again and turns back to the car--

There are two Gatorade bottles in the backseat.

The door is locked, of course, so Emily looks around for an appropriate rock to break the window with. It doesn't take long, there are rocks all around, but she is feeling very impatient about this. She only has one water bottle and some salted almonds left in her pack. The Gatorades are a blessing.

The smell that washes out when the glass shatters is absolutely overpowering. Emily doubles over and stumbles away, sitting on a rock on the far side of the road and coughing. She stays there for a while, waiting for the smell to clear, and it's five minutes later before she realizes the crow is gone.

The smell doesn't seem to be getting much better, but she holds her breath and heads for the backseat anyway, opening the door and grabbing the Gatorades and then bolting back to her rock. One of them has been opened, orange and only half full, but the other one (light green) is untouched. She puts them in her pack and gets ready to set up camp. There's a shrub here by her rock, and the two mean she should at least get a little shade for most of the day. Apart from the faint stench of decomposing flesh, it's a nice spot.

She's halfway through making her emergency blanket into a shelter when she hears the cawing. It's too much for one crow, voices overlapping in a cacophony of squawks, and when she looks up she's not surprised to see at least twenty crown flying in from the west.

She is careful to avert her eyes as the crows alight on the car and hop inside. She has grown desensitized to a great many things, but there are still some sights she will never be entirely accustomed to, and this is one of them.

The crows finish their meal eventually and flap away westward again, back toward where they came, and Emily finds herself thinking--

_If they came from there and went back to there, they must have a reason for going there._

Maybe-- just maybe-- if she follows them, she will come to water.

***

By the time night comes and Em is able to pack up and head on, Gatorade is all she has left. She hasn't sweat that much, but her body needs fluids, no matter how few she actually has. She drinks the Gatorade sip by sip as she walks, conserving as carefully as she can, savoring the sweetness and coolness that soothes the scratching in her throat. She has to make it last as long as she can. Still, it's gone by sunrise, and a headache begins to build.

She keeps walking.

She can't stop now, can't afford to set up camp and wait the day out. She's losing fluid, drying up from the inside out, and she has to stay on her feet, head forward, search for any sign of water in this parched, baking land.

She keeps walking.

Left, right. Left, right. Step by step. The headache pounds. Left, right. Each step raises dust. It catches the wind and gets in her eyes, her nose, her mouth, making her cough and choke. Left, right. Left, right. Westward, step by step. Foot by foot. Day by day. On and on. As the crows had done.

Left, right. Left, right. Forward. On and on. A long shadow beginning to stretch in front of her, pointing westward. Away from the slowly rising sun. Toward that dark line splitting the dust just before the horizon.

West, where the crows had come from.

West, where the crows had gone.

The sun beats down. It crushes her shoulders. It scorches the ground and burns her feet. She stumbles. She wants to stop. She can't stop. She's afraid to stop. If she stops she might not be able to get back up again.

Left, right. Left, right. Step by step. The horizon moves closer. Her family stands up out of the dust, comes and walks beside her. _We walked through a desert once_ , they whisper, and she says back, _yeah, but that was just a hike and there was a parking lot at the end of the trail with our minivan and suitcases and a cooler full of snacks and lemonade, we weren't lost in the desert_ , and her father laughs, _we were always lost_ , and her mother says, _the whole world is a desert_ , and Emily says back, _now it is, but it wasn't then_ \--but she stumbles, loses sight of them as her knees hit the ground, and when she looks up they're gone.

She blinks and she's standing again, then walking forward, her steps unsteady. It was a hallucination, she decides, and pushes on. Time passes, she staggers forward, weaves a little, but keeps heading west. The sun is folding her over, loading pound upon pound into her empty backpack. Her legs fold and she drops to all fours. Head down, bowed below the sun. She has to keep going. She can't stop here. She looks up--

\--and Michelle is there, tugging at her shirt with non-existent fingers, begging, wide eyes and so many words Emily can't even hear. Emily blinks and reaches, her hand sliding right through where her eyes say Meesh's chest is. _Get up_ , Meesh says, _come on, move, you can't die here, come on, you've got to move_ , and Emily finally finds the energy to force herself vertical once more. _Why does it matter so much_ , she asks, _why can't I die here_ , and Meesh swears and says, _someone's got to survive_ , and Emily laughs and says, _but surviving is so much work and I'm feeling lazy today, I'll put it off till tomorrow_ , and Meesh lets go of her and steps back, says, _but you have to, someone has to, you have to_ , and Emily is tired.

 _Why don't you do it then_ , she says, and Meesh sighs and shakes her head and says, _it's gotta be you, who knows who else is left, she laughs, who knows if I'm left: certainly not you_. And Emily is tired but she doesn't want to disappoint Meesh, even if it's not really Meesh at all--just a hallucination--so she says, _okay_ , and Meesh hugs her except Emily can't feel it, and she whispers in Emily's ear, _just keep walking, okay, I'll see you in heaven_...

And she melts away into the cracked earth.

Emily keeps walking. Left, right. Left, right. Step by step. Gotta keep focus. She starts to count her steps. Left, right. Left, right. One, two, three, four... thirteen... twenty eight... ninety six... three hundred seventy five... she loses count around four hundred, but it doesn't really matter, she'd stopped focusing a while ago. She must be nearing a thousand steps, or maybe only six-hundred, although maybe as many as two thousand. Maybe less. Maybe more. It doesn't matter. It never did. Nothing really does anyway.

Ten or ten thousand steps go by and the dark line is close, wide, much closer than the horizon. It shakes with every step. Or maybe she's shaking with every step instead. She realizes something, someone, is next to her and turns her head to find her old friend Jessica there, still dressed in the Garden City High track uniform, just as young as the last time Emily saw her. _Wanna race_ , she asks as she used to, _I bet I can beat you this time_ , and Emily frowns, _we haven't talked in ages_ , and Jess shrugs, _when you run you don't have to talk_ , her voice both apologetic and accusing.

Emily sighs. _Well, you're floating_ , she points out, _that's an unfair advantage, I have to run on the ground_ , and Jess grins sharply, _we've been running like this for seven years, you should know that me being three inches off the ground doesn't mean anything, and anyway this race here is more of a relay than anything else_ , and Emily smiles back, _you were always good at those_ , and Jess laughs, _of course I was_ , and she pulls out a baton and waves it, _now I've carried this thing all the way so far, I think it's your turn. You just gotta take it to the finish line_ , she points toward the dark line, _and don't drop it, okay?_  

 _That was one time and it wasn't my fault_ , Emily rolls her eyes, _and anyway it didn't even count_ , and Jess laughs again, turning around to drift backwards, and Emily realizes that she's somehow still walking. _But the whole state saw it_ , Jess teases, and Emily scowls, _I liked you better alive_ , and then feels bad, but Jess giggles just how she used to and says, _me too_ , and offers her the baton. Emily reaches out, puts her fingers to it, and it vanishes.

 _Now it's yours_ , Jess says, and whirls away on a breeze.

When she's gone, all that's left behind is silence.

Emily walks for a little more, then blinks and finds herself facedown on the ground. Her knees are stinging, and the palms of her hands leave red-brown smears in the dust. The pain barely registers. She's empty. Her head feels like someone's taking a sledgehammer to her temples. Her eyes don't want to open. She should get up and keep moving, she knows, but her legs aren't obeying her anymore. No matter how much she tells them to straighten out and get her walking again, they just won't move.

Kendy is next to her now, crouching, a hand on her shoulder. _Just a little farther now, she says, almost there, just a tiny bit more_... but Emily can't do it. She says so, and Kendy shakes her head, _no, of course you can, you're so close, you can't give up now, you've come so far, there's water just ahead_ , and Emily raises her head, _how do you know?_ and Kendy says, _I can smell it_.

Emily can't smell anything.

 _How do I get there?_ she asks, and Kendy smiles, _just get up and head forward, straight like an arrow, you can't miss it_. She holds out a hand, and Emily takes it. Her head pounds, and when she opens her eyes, Kendy is gone and she's walking again.

She looks ahead. The dark line is growing. That must be where the water that Kendy was talking about is. It was a dehydration-induced hallucination, but she can still believe in what it said. She needs water. Kendy said it has water. She's almost there. She's almost made it, just a few hours more--

She blinks.

It's in front of her. It runs before her feet, a stretch of negative stretching out for miles. It's real. She's real, and she's here. All she needs to do is take one more step and she'll be there, at the dark line, where the crows went and came from--

She steps.

Her foot finds air.

Several pebbles fall with her, knocked loose from the rim. A crow caws hoarsely, somewhere below, then above, and she swears she smells water--

\--she hits the ground--

And then nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, she's not dead. Otherwise, there couldn't be a chapter 3, could there?

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at (currently) [sonnett-menges](http://www.sonnett-menges.tumblr.com).


End file.
